Has anyone been watching the races at all. I have been trying to catch what I can on TV and mostly on you tube. Wordering if anyone is up in the San Fran area watching the races live. I was awsome to see the big cat do a pitch pole in the bay.

Tony 83 was certainly special for all Aussie's and we are not involved with an Aussie syndicate at the Cup - we certainly are involved with personel. James Spithill to name one of many. A couple of our Olympic sailors are also very involved in The Cup challenge and defense.

America's cup racing is the sailing equivillent of F1 racing. The people are the best of the best the equipment is cutting edge stuff and there are rich people pouring their ill gotten gains in big time. The end result for the weekend sailor is technoligy developments in sails and materials that flow on.

There is a site that covers a lot of big sailing events www.tractrac.com/ check it out. I was watching the Etchell Worlds this year on Trac Trac and discovered that the "greyhounds of the sea " (Etchells) tack through 90 deg. The AI must tack through 110 deg.

I was told that some of the carbon-fiber(?) masts used in the America's Cup races are costing $10-20 million dollars just for one mast. Not sure if that is true...but wow...that would buy quite a few Tandems.

Looking at the videos out of San Francisco news stations it looks like the boat is toast and breaking up. It doesn't look like they're going to be able to salvage a lot out of this. There's a few million dollars going out to sea.

My daughter and I watched one a week or so ago from Chrissy field, they did a big tack in tight to the beach which was cool.I work in SF a couple of days a week, and I see them zooming around from our office nearly every afternoon.Fishing buddy picked up a few pieces of blown up carbon fiber boat while out salmon trolling....There was also this crazy sailboat the Hydroptere here...basically it was flying